December 13, 2012

Really? Where's the strangling? Calling speech offensive is more speech, not censorship.

Via Instapundit, who quotes the headline that contains what I say is a deceptive metaphor: "Harvard, Legendary Home Of Harvard Lampoon, Strangles Campus Satire."

If the authorities are offended and express outrage and demand more circumspect speech, satire is not murdered. It is the opposite of murdered. It is given fertile ground in which to grow and prosper. What better foil for comedy than a bunch of dour, repressive authority figures? Since when is satire ruined when the superiors don't think it's funny? Seems to me their outrage makes it funnier.

If you don't have enough courage with your humor to keep moving forward, you were never very funny in the first place.

47 comments:

College students can say and do things that are remarkably tone deaf. I don't quite understood why such things generate such OUTRAGE!!!! instead of, say, an eyeroll. From the flyer at Harvard to that picture at Penn State.

For the Administration of the College to get involved in these kerfuffles says only one thing: We don't trust you trod-upon people being made fun of to have the wherewithal to defend yourself. Think of us as your benevolent overlords, and, oh, by the way, we're raising tuition next year.

The perils of being mainstream.How will the outlaws of yesterday handle the outlaws of today? The same way the establishment always handles it.How the anti-establishment becomes the irrelevant. Those stuffy former hippies are just too funny. And they don't have heroism, service to country, morality or hard work to point to, to make them relevant ie the Greatest Generation.

Getting called to the principal's office and forced to apologize for one thing or another was strictly high school back when I was a kid. Happened all the time. I had to do it once myself. Of course, the apology is always completely phony.

Extended adolescence has promoted this goofy ritual to the college level.

So, I think the answer here is that college is what high school used to be.

"Strangled" seems like the right word to me. When you've got two hands around your neck, it's difficult to speak.

@EDH Yeah, I saw that, but I can't see any threat of discipline of any kind there. Someone was asked to come in for conversation about it and he went. I know the words "summon" and "investigation" seem threatening, but I don't see any substance beyond the expression of concern that the authorities are doing. They care about climate and comfort on campus and they're doing their theater of concern. Where's the harm to the speakers other than the effect of more speech?

BTW, I was in the right (or somewhat in the right) when I was called to the principal's office for my dressing down. I had been warming up on my trumpet before band rehearsal, when this fat girl who had a crush on me tried to get my attention by hitting me repeatedly upside the head with rolled up music manuscripts.

I got pissed off and yelled "Fuck off!"

There's a moral in here, which is that women are always the victim in any altercation with men. This is, to a large extent, the explanation for the gay political hysteria. Women like gay men, and seem to assume that they are helpless and effeminate like women, and thus deserving to be in on the scam.

Disciplining the fat girl for hitting me upside the head never seemed to occur to anybody.

Ann Althouse said...@EDH Yeah, I saw that, but I can't see any threat of discipline of any kind there.

The word you left out is "yet". When a school official orders you to explain yourself (in a formal setting where they are in complete control), he/she is giving you a warning: continue in this vain and harsher actions will follow.

I would assume the powers that are at Haavahd do have the option of tossing the offenders out of school.

That, to me, would pretty effectively strangle their efforts.

Shouting Thomas said...

BTW, I was in the right (or somewhat in the right) when I was called to the principal's office for my dressing down. I had been warming up on my trumpet before band rehearsal, when this fat girl who had a crush on me tried to get my attention by hitting me repeatedly upside the head with rolled up music manuscripts.

I got pissed off and yelled "Fuck off!"

A simple, "Will you stop?" (what I use on The Blonde occasionally), will also work.

I think the University's reaction was highly predictable. I wouldn't be surprised if the authors of this prank held a contest among themselves to see who could most closely approximate the inevitable press release in advance!

How about "Squeezing?" Such as squeezing the meaning you want out of a subject. Obviously, the Harvard administrators are attempting to strangle satire. Calling someone to "the office" is a threat. If you don't understand that, you're out of touch.

If you don't have enough courage with your humor to keep moving forward, you were never very funny in the first place.

In First Amendment law, the words "chilling effect" usually refer to the way people who are not themselves subjected to penalty feel inhibited by penalties imposed on others. It's not a general reason not to express disapproval. That wouldn't make sense. It would be internally contradictory.

Very good point -- in general, official expressions of outrage about anonymous critical speech such as this mostly backfire on the officials. Obviously this was a biting and fairly effective anonymous attack on Harvard's decades of tolerating anti-Semitic finals clubs, yet few would ever have heard of it absent the complaints by the Harvard administration and the usual "victim" groups.

Harvard's harsh treatment of this matter is hardly unique -- Harvard routinely does its best to undermine anonymous speech attacking its institutional practices, sometimes more successfully than in this instance.

Earlier this year, for example, Harvard law students protested Harvard's renaming of the law school's old student center. The Harkness Commons had long been named for Harvard's most generous contributor ever, but for a relatively paltry sum (compared to Harkness's contribution), Harvard renamed it for a businessman (Finn Caspersen) who had committed suicide as the IRS closed in on him for allegedly cheating on his taxes, for perhaps as much as $100 million. The students' posters were ripped down, and Harvard used a bogus DCMA copyright claim to get WordPress to delete their blog, so that apparently virtually no one heard about the protest at the time.

The students then created a new blog, and launched a second poster campaign, targeting the law school's decision to invite Attorney General Eric Holder to speak at campus despite being under a massive ethical cloud (in contrast to the last sitting AG to have visited while under a cloud, a conservative who was harassed and even stalked). Yet again, the students' posters were ripped down, and the law school used another bogus DCMA claim to get WordPress to delete this second blog.

In the end, these censorship efforts backfired, but it took outside help to make that happen. Fortunately, law professors Glenn Reynolds and William Jacobson publicized Harvard's suppression techniques, and encouraged the students to persevere. They did, and since then have done a couple more protests. You can read all about it on the students' THIRD blog, "Harvard Law School is Bogus," here:http://harvardlawschoolisbogus.wordpress.com.

I would never commit such satire at my place of employment; or if I did, I would not gripe about being sanctioned by my employer.What the Crimson students seem not to realize, is that they are functionally employees of Harvard, and as such, contractually bound not to disparage the Harvard brand.It probably actually says that in black-and-white, SOMEWHERE in the fine print they signed before being admitted.(Do I need to append that mysterious universal symbol mentioned upstream?)